When You Were Born

When you were born, the doctor’s told us that you were smaller than they expected you to be at 39 weeks so it was time for you to come out and meet your family. We didn’t sleep that night – you or me or Daddy. At 6AM, we started getting ready. The sun rose beautifully that morning and streaked the sky with beautiful color and awe. In the delivery room, the contractions started – easy at first, but quickly gaining in intensity. My body shook and grew and expanded and started making room to do what should be impossible. What is unimaginable and against logic and physics, but completely in synch with nature. My ability to cope through the pain was waning. I needed help coping which is unlike me and was hard to accept. The room was filled with light and love and people you never met and your beautiful Daddy was there coping for me when I couldn’t. When I doubted, he reassured me. When a contraction came, he applied pressure or had me breath with him. He told me I was strong and I could do this when I told him I just wanted a C-section so that it would be over. I was so afraid for you and afraid for me. After all, you were so small the doctor’s said. As I screamed in pain and cried in anguish, your Daddy held me and I knew that pain like that could only mean that we were close and soon I would meet my daughter and my entire life, my whole perspective would change and I would feel like a new person. I would feel like I was the one being born.
At 9:32pm on Wednesday, November 3, 2010 you were born weighing 5 pounds, 10 ounces and measuring 19 inches long.
When you were born, I couldn’t sing lullabies to you without crying for the first three months. My heart would grow and swell and fill with more love than exists in the whole world would somehow fit into the cavernous space of my heart when I rocked you and tried to sing. The stars in the sky, the grass on the ground and every sunset I’d ever seen suddenly made sense. I could see now that they were created just so that I could watch you marvel at them someday. So that I could marvel at them with you as I tried to find words to explain things like magic and beauty and belief and faith and upon running out of words and never explaining it very well anyway, we would just sit and marvel together and feel big and small and together and blessed and loved and know that sometimes, together is all you need. When you were born I knew peace and completion and contentment and “good enough” for the first time in my life and if I did nothing else for the rest of my life, I knew I had done enough and done all that I could do.
When you were born, you screamed so loud and I cried the happiest tears of my life knowing you were alive and here and healthy. And, as I look back now, I understand that this is the way of life. If you are ever in pain and screaming – you are ALIVE and that is something! Really something! And, it’s a great start because for all of us, those are the moments in life when it hurts most, when we just want to give up, when we scream our loudest from pain…sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, but pain nonetheless and our perspective changes, the world tilts on its axis and these are precisely the moments when… we are born.